The concept of fascism can be explained in terms of its historical and supra-historical meanings, and these two lines do not necessarily run parallel; they overlap only partially and ultimately diverge, driven by similar forces. The fascism of 1919, with the founding of the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in Italy, or the founding of the NSDAP in 1920 in Germany, is no longer the necessary foundation of today’s fascist structures, but mass extermination through the spirit of technology — which clearly emerged for the first time in World War I — and the fascist dynamic inherent in technology are basic characteristics that lie at the core of the term’s meaning. Fascism consists fundamentally in the unification of the masses’ attention through technology, initially through the techniques of war and the reproductive techniques of so-called mass media, which took on unimaginable dimensions throughout the 20th century, the century of fascism.
The Manifeste de Futurisme (1909) is, as Walter Benjamin implicitly pointed out in the epilogue to the second edition of Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (1936), the exemplary document of all past and future fascism. Here, the negation of the past and the destruction of nature and its replacement by the myth of the future and technology, the glorification of speed, violence, war, patriotism, contempt for women, the struggle against feminism, as well as the destruction of museums, libraries, and academies — in short, the destruction of historical and critical thought — are programmatically listed. If, however, Benjamin still speaks of an aestheticization of political life by fascism, one can say today that current fascist tendencies are more concerned with the hollowing out and numbing of all possible political life. In the era of the unlimited production of virtual realities through artificially processed worlds of image and sound that are barely distinguishable from face-to-face and organic reality, truth is merely a promise — that is, the product of a demagogic imperative that shifts according to mood and necessity.
The fundamental principle of fascism, historically and today linked to relations of production and property, is the complete domination of the masses and their execution at the pyre of power and capital. Fascism is the “unbridled survival” of which Theodor W. Adorno speaks in a conversation with Elias Canetti in 1962. The “savage will to self-preservation” that does not preserve, but destroys, and in its destruction ceaselessly nourishes the illusion of its triumph and the associated fact of its imminent downfall. This will to self-preservation must be assumed not only for organic systems, but also for completely artificial and inorganic systems.
Fascism, born of the wars and technological development of the 20th century, is the true disease of a humanity trapped in the instinct of self-preservation and the worship of its technical projections. Because of the fusion between fascism and technology, any critique of fascism must necessarily be a critique of technology. A critique of the apparatus is its starting point, both of the state’s bureaucratic apparatus — which sets in motion and maintains the apparatus of expulsion and annihilation — and of the photographic apparatus and all its analog and digital derivatives and extensions, as well as its computational systems and programs.
The black box is the model of every totalitarian system and, therefore, of all fascism, since it seeks a fundamental concealment and dissimulation of the intentions to manipulate the masses. Even the functionaries of fascism, including the chosen messianic leader, do not have a clear understanding of their role. One might even say that fascism in its most complete form, as a totalitarian apparatus, is invisible to any of its functionaries and, as a perfect machine of destruction, consumes all its parts to sustain itself. In this sense, a possible superintelligence generated by the algorithms and programs of a computational machine and possessing an intrinsic will to self-preservation would necessarily be fascist. Terror and torture, not only in their physical sense but also in their metaphysical sense, are thus essential elements of fascism and are not limited to the victims but also fall upon the perpetrators. Terror and distortion, directed against life and the body as basic elements of the organic, are the apparatus and instruments of fascism, which finds its justification in the inorganic and opaque process of unleashed technology. The individual blinded by the immediate and media-driven fails to glimpse their role as mere fuel to ignite the totalitarian torches of the techno-fascist system of our present.
Dirk Michael Hennrich